Wake of the Storm - The Mason Storm Series Book One

What are you doing every day at 4pm? Part 2 (02/06/17)

Have you ever been in a bar fight, or around one? Six, seven guys drunk, high and slugging it out? Maybe one or two with a broken beer bottle. Complete chaos, right? Now picture a hundred (sometimes a lot more) men, more drunk and more high, and all of them with something that cuts.

Racial wars in prison start just like the wars in movies like Troy and 300. Everyone runs to the middle with reckless abandonment. BAM! And whoever doesn't look like you, you try to kill. I guess there are nicer ways to say it, but that's basically it in a nutshell. No cut-card. No sugar on top. No one goes into a riot with the intention of kicking and biting or pulling hair. People are there to fight for their lives. You swing and swing until you either get hit from the towers, there's no one left standing, or the Goon Squad shows up in riot gear with pepper spray.

I'm glad none of that happened today.

It's after midnight and the lights are out. Most of the three-hundred and twenty-fifty inmates in my unit have now been sleeping for a couple of hours. I can't. I am lying on my bunk staring at the bunk above, thinking about the day, and what almost happened. Somebody could have been hurt today over a seventy-five dollar drug debt. Senseless. Jimmy came in an addict and he's done nothing to change what he's going home as. His eighty-four year-old grandmother sends him a couple hundred dollars a month and instead of him using it to buy food like most of us, he gets high. It's his right. No one can tell him how to be a man in here. The problem is he's not taking care of his business, and it lands back in our lap.

The problem with these drug addicts is they don't have a stop button. They dig themselves in until they are over their head and over their budget. The GDs cut Jimmy off; told him to pay his bill and instead he went to another group and ran up a debt with them. The GDs had a right to be upset, though they didn't have the right to put hands on him. That's a no-no in prison. We were there to settle that score.

As soon as I turned back to face the still growing group of GDs at 2nd base, someone behind me said, "Nick, tell him!"

I know all of these guys like my brothers. We spend every single day together. Most of the time, all day long. I know all of their voices by heart, except this one. It even takes me a second to realize who 'Nick' is. The rest of us just call him Flip.

When I turned back around, the person repeated, "C'mon Nick, tell him!"

In prison there are only two types of people–those who break, and those who are unbreakable. You come in one of these types, or you turn into one. Sometimes, you come in as one and leave the other. In situations like today you find out who you are, and who everyone around you is.

Silent Bob hasn't said a word in the last ten months of his life; four of those months have been spent here with us. He hangs with us, eats with us, plays sports with us, he even laughs with us. He's one of the guys. And not a syllable until today. It was him who said it. He could no longer stick to his guns. He gave up not talking. The situation broke him.

I stared at him, partly shocked. "Tell me what?" I asked.

"I was in the stall in the bathroom and I heard Nick talking to Spanky," (the shot-caller for the GDs) "Spank told him they wanted to try and talk it out. They don't want to go to war. He said they have a lot of money owed to them on the yard. You know they control all the heroin and tobacco. They don't want to lose that. He said they would take care of Oup for touching Jimmy."

I was looking him in the eyes and could tell he was telling the truth. He was scared to death. This was his first prison riot.

I looked over at Flip. "Spank say this?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter what he said. They broke the rules. They put their hands on one of us. There's nothing to talk about!"

Right then Dave looked over my shoulder and said, "Spank is walking by himself to 3rd base. I think he wants to talk."

I'm still looking at Flip. "I have an idea. Just trust me," I said. "Let me see if I can get something better than blood. If I can't, I promise we'll go. We'll make 'em pay. I promise."

I waited for him to respond, but he didn't. His eyes were glossed over. All he was thinking about was settling the score. Flip is one of the 'unbreakable' ones. He was willing to go to war, (with the possibility of losing his life or taking someone else's in the process) for something he believes in; for the rules that have been set in place. We are cut from the same cloth, but today wasn't the day to prove it. Not with a fight anyway. There would be other battles down the road where Flip and I could slug it out. Today, I had a way to put the White Boys on top.

"Dave, keep him here for a second. Let me see what Spank has to say." I turned and walked to 3rd base.

When Silent Bob said Spank was concerned with the money he had on the yard, which was probably in excess of twenty to thirty grand, I knew right then I had bargaining power. The money was their weak spot; their breaking point. If we would have fought, all of us would have gone to the hole and then waited to be split up and sent to different parts of the country. The money would have been lost and they knew it.

The GDs control the yard, the drugs and tobacco. The Mexicans control the hooch. And the White Boys pay top price for everything. A carton of cigarettes runs between fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars. They are then broken down and sold individually for twenty to twenty-five dollars each. Two hundred cigarettes in a carton. You do the math.

I happen to know the GDs get four cartons a week from one of the cops, and I know they give the cop five hundred each.

When I got to 3rd I nodded. Spank did the same. I decided to stay quiet and see what he had to say. As far as he was concerned he thought we were ready to go, and I now knew him and his group were not.

"Listen, we'll take care of Oup. The debt's paid. Jimmy doesn't owe us anything. It was all a misunderstanding. Oup will apologize and shake his hand."

"You know that's not going to cut it. You have been down long enough to know that. Tell Oup to stick his apology in his ass. My guys want blood, not words. Most of them don't want to be here anyway. You know how these guys are."

"There has to be some kind of agreement we can come to," Spank said, and I knew I had him.

"Make it worth their while. Gimme something to take back to them. Something where everyone saves face," I said.

"I'll give you a three grams of tar. That's like three grand."

"No, no more drugs. That's the problem to begin with."

"What then?"

"Cut us in on the tobacco. We'll pay the fifteen hundred a carton, but we get them all. We want to control the yard.

Just like that the White Boys have a hustle. We are in the tobacco business and Flip is at the top.

Gregory C. Brown is the author of The Mason Storm Series and just recently released Book One, Wake of the Storm. He is also the creator of Stories from Behind the Wall with weekly installments found at https://gregorycbrownbooks.com/stories-from-behind-the-wall/